Making CampaignMember customizable
I have been talking a lot about the Campaign infrastructure in Salesforce.com lately. One of the things I really want (aside from Sharing Rules) is the ability to add fields to the CampaignMember table. This is the table that tracks the people attending the event, or being sent the direct mail piece.
It would be easy to allow us to add more fields to that table–Salesforce.com is very good at that. I think the challenge comes in how to manage the display of those customizations. And here’s where I wanted to throw an idea out and see what people thought.
Out of the box, you could create new fields on CampaignMember. Then you could modify the CampaignMember Page Layout to control how those records look. That’s pretty straightforward. And since we’ve got a Page Layout, I’m implying that we’re able to view individual CampaignMember records, which means we should have a Related List on the Campaign.
So if I’m having my yearly auction dinner and I need to track membership, I can create a picklist for entre, and I can use that data to inform the caterers. I could even set up a web to lead form because Lead mapping would let me pass that data through to the CampaignMember table.
But when I want to do direct mail, I don’t care about entre. This is where Record Types could come in. We could Create a Campaign Record Type for Direct Mail, and then tie that to a Campaign Member Record Type. Then, all the Direct Mail Campaigns would have CampaignMembers with Direct Mail fields, which could be controlled by a specific page layout. All my Dinner Record Types would have entre as a field on the CampaignMember Page Layout.
This gives groups lots of flexibility around have simple and complex events. Just a thought that has been rattling around in my head. The Salesforce.com folks probably have a better concept than this on their roadmap somewhere, and I can’t wait to see it.
